


Mind and Voice, Body and Mind

by Jazzering



Category: Transistor (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Red lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2018-07-28 08:44:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7633189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jazzering/pseuds/Jazzering
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Red doesn't kill herself. Why would she?</p>
<p>Instead, although her life has been changed forever, she has a chance to make things right -- a chance to live, if not the life she'd planned on, at least a life worth living anyhow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> _A long time ago, a woman and the Trace of her lover set out to save a city from its most marvelous creation: the lifeblood that flowed through its ever-changing veins. They succeeded, but at a terrible cost: the woman, previously an enchanting singer, was rendered voiceless; the city itself lay dead before her; and her lover could never be restored to his former, human body._
> 
> _Some say that, overcome with grief at the loss of her city, her people, and her lover, she took her own life with the weapon that he had become. The city lay in wait for a while before falling into the hands of a new creator, and history resumed its course accordingly. Some of us, however…some of us tell this part of the story a little differently._

He’s sitting slumped on the sidewalk in front of her, a puddle of dark color in a sea of just-barely-filled-in white. But she’s also holding him in her hands. His voice echoes from beneath her fingers, obscured by metal and electricity but still his. A separation of mind and body…but what matters more?

She knows the answer.

_I will always…always find you…_

“That’s not me. Not anymore. I’m still with you…but I’m not getting out of here.”

The Transistor sinks into the ground easily, easily, like the stone is only butter under her fingertips. It stands upright when she pulls her hands away. From this distance, the heat coming from it could be the warmth of his living body.

“Red? Hey. What are you doing? Wait. Wait, wait, what – what are you doing?”

He questions her. He pleads with her. His voice tapers and breaks in the middle of sentences in a way that tells her just how rattled he is, just how hard this whole thing has been for him. She has no way of reassuring him, not really. 

She’s leaning against him, the thing that used to be him, now. In front of her, he’s still speaking. Mind and voice, body and mind. She twitches her fingers and lifts her hand, and the Transistor rises. 

“Red, please don’t.”

Her heart is heavy in her chest, the way it is – the way it was after a good concert. She feels every beat, pushing adrenaline through her veins. She feels _alive_ , and heavy with it.

She wonders if he feels like this even now, if electricity sparks and zips and hums through him like blood.

“Wait!”

She pulls the Transistor to her.

_“Red!”_

She huffs as the flat of the blade strikes her, hard, in the chest. Harder than she meant it to; she had only wanted to call it to her. She will likely bruise, but that is all.

That’s all. 

From inside the Transistor he’s gasping her name like she’d hit him, rather than the other way around. Maybe she had. She holds the metal blade to her chest and rests her temple against its broad blunt edge, breathing. Letting him know.

“Red,” he says like that’s all there is. “Red.”

Her voice is gone, a part of her apart from her. All that’s left is a function, a ghost in the machine. But it’s in there with him, and he’s here with her. She concentrates with all she has.

“How could you think that of me?” says the Transistor, in her voice. “After all this, after we fought so hard?”

Silence. She wonders if he can see this happening, where he is. What is the visual representation of something that is only sound?

“Whoa,” he says finally.

She smiles against him, suddenly too tired to laugh. Her energy is finally gone, and now tears of exhaustion sting the corners of her eyes. That’s all right. His laughter, warm and affectionate with relief, holds enough joy for the both of them. 

“Gotta admit, Red, you had me real worried there for a minute.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Ah,” he says dismissively, and gives a crackling, staticky sigh. It hitches at the end, as though he, too, has tears to shed.

She waits, her head still pressed against the blade. He needs a moment. So does she. And time is something they have in abundance now: a bittersweet gift for the start of their new lives. They can sit here together for a minute and think their separate thoughts.

She closes her eyes and pushes aside the flashing sense-memories of battle that immediately surround her: the stink of fried electronics, the slick sensation of a jaunt, the power rolling from beneath her fingertips. 

_No. Something else._

Her mind takes her to a beach, a hammock, a quiet place, and the sound of her music against the percussive, steady backdrop of waves striking the shore. Faintly, dimly in her mind’s eye, she can see the stars on the grid above her head, fading slowly in and out of daylight. Beautiful.

When he speaks again, his voice slides so naturally into her half-dream that it takes her a moment to remember what’s happening.

“So where _do_ you want to start?” he asks.

She sighs, and reaches for her voice again.

“I want to rest.”

“Yeah, Red,” he says gently. “Yeah. You’ve earned it.”


	2. Chapter 2

She walks through the city, dragging the Transistor behind her – if it was too heavy at the beginning of all this, it’s definitely too much for her to carry now – and humming thinly. Patches of color, stonemasonry, glass spring up in her wake, trailing her footsteps. She doesn’t try to reform anything specific, doesn’t stop until she gets to her apartment in Highrise.

She closes her eyes and hums again, thinking of home: the rough shingles, the mosaic over the door, the flagstones under her feet, the plants that line the ornate railing of the terrace.

_Think I’ll go where it suits me…moving out to the Country…_

This is better than the Country any day. Or it will be, in a minute.

When she opens her eyes again her place looks just like she left it. Golden light spills out of the doorway, turning the triangle set in the flagstones into a beacon and highlighting the red in the Transistor’s shining surface.

“How are you gonna –” he asks, just as he had half a lifetime ago, but Red walks up to the door confidently and tries the latch. It clicks open easily in her hand, and she has to grin. 

“Nice work.”

“Wait until you see what’s inside.”

He makes a querying noise, but she doesn’t answer, just pushes into the apartment and lets the door swing shut behind her. She triple-checks the lock, then turns and heads for the kitchen.

His laugh, when he sees what awaits them there, is delighted. “Flatbread!”

Red smiles and lifts the lid of the box. Still warm. Doesn’t taste quite right, though. Exhaustion, or – 

“No good?”

She shrugs, putting the remainder of the slice back in the box and closing the lid again. She’s still tired. She’ll try to eat again tomorrow. 

The bedroom is just as she remembers leaving it, almost two days ago now: sheets and blankets rumpled and thrown haphazardly across the thick, comfortable bed, a pillow on the loveseat squashed where someone had sat down without bothering to move it, a book open on the coffee table, his everyday shoes lined up neatly by the closet doors. Here are the pieces of their life together. They tell a story: two lovers, secure in each other’s company, live here.

She lifts the Transistor into her arms for comfort and takes a slow, awkward step into the room, soaking in the sight of it. It feels at once familiar and unbearably strange, and she can tell from his silence that he feels the same way.

They stop in the middle of the room. There is a long pause.

“…Where’re you gonna put me?”

Red leans him carefully against the closet door, next to his empty shoes, then steps back and pulls his jacket from her shoulders. The crossguards fit neatly into the sleeves, and the black length of the jacket drapes neatly around the blade. It’s at once sad and comforting to see him there, like that.

“Is this all right?”

“This is fine,” he says.

She nods and turns to his dresser to hide her expression, taking her time in rummaging through the drawers. She pulls out the oldest, most comfortable shirt of his she can find, changes into it with limbs heavy from exhaustion, and drops gracelessly onto the bed, looking at the Transistor. She has no way to be certain, of course, but she senses that he’s looking back at her with the same attention.

She has to go to him. He needs to be closer.

It’s probably the only thing that could invoke her to stand again, but it gets her on her feet and over to the closet. She takes the jacket off, drapes it over the arm of the loveseat, drags him to the bed. Hoists him up onto it.

She hits the lights and feels her way back to the bed in the dark, imagining as hard as she can – and for a moment, when Red settles onto the mattress, she believes the lie. Heat emanates from the Transistor just as it had before, fooling her into thinking it was a human body, and his familiar scent envelops her thanks to the shirt she’s wearing. The bed even dips under the Transistor’s weight, though not as much as she’s used to. She sighs and snuggles into the bedclothes, pulling the blankets up over her and putting a hand on the blade, just below where the crossguards meet.

“Is this all right?” she asks again.

“This is,” he says, and his voice cracks a little. “This is perfect.”

It’s not. But it’s better. She sighs again and inches closer. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

Then she sleeps. Whether he does the same, she doesn’t know.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You get a warning for this one -- Red has a panic attack, and it's fairly descriptive. If you'd rather not read that, stop at "She'll just have to..." and pick up again at "Instinctively". 
> 
> Also, I'm a) incredibly busy and b) no longer in Transistor hell quite as much as I was, so while I do intend to finish this story (and am only planning on two to four more updates) it might be a while before the next one comes out. Just a heads up. If you keep reading, thank you. If you have enjoyed what I've posted so far, I'm glad. :)

She wakes, and feels empty. Spent. She stretches, opens her eyes, and remembers why. 

“Hi,” he greets her quietly. 

“Hey.”

She closes her eyes and goes back to sleep.

\--

The second time isn’t much better. She does manage to get up, though, and shuffle to the bathroom, shuffle to the kitchen. The flatbread is still there; a quick check reveals very little else in the way of food. Well, if she had postponed her weekly shopping trip, Red thinks wryly, closing a cupboard, she’d at least had good reason to. Not to worry. She’ll just have to…

Red realizes where that thought is going and shoves it forcefully aside, but it’s too late. Realization drops itself onto her shoulders, even heavier than the Transistor.

The entire city. All its buildings, its lights, its trees and statues and halls and streets and bridges and _people_. All of it, all of it waiting for her voice and her hands and the Transistor held between them to piece everything back together. And it all has to be done _right_. What if she forgets something? More importantly, what if she forgets some _one_ , or reforms them wrongly? What if she can’t even bring the people back? And after that – if by some miracle she manages to pull everything off without a hitch – what comes next?

Red sucks a breath in through her teeth and stumbles forward to grip the table with both hands. Her mind is a sudden whirlwind of panic, her heartbeat heavy and painful in her chest and beneath every inch of her skin. The back of her neck is covered in cold sweat. _What comes next?_

It takes her a few minutes, but eventually she manages to let go of the table long enough to stagger back to the bedroom. She closes the door behind her; the sound makes her flinch. 

“Red?” he asks from the bed, his voice high and worried, and that makes her flinch too. “What happened? What is it?”

Shaking, she climbs back onto the bed and pulls the blankets around her in a messy heap. She hauls the Transistor into her lap and holds it to her with desperate fierceness, curling around it as she struggles to breathe normally.

“Red?”

She shakes her head jerkily against the blade, and he finally gets the hint. There is a long silence, broken only by her harsh breathing. Gradually, though, her pulse stops its frantic jackhammering, and her breath hitches in a sigh, then begins to fall into a normal rhythm once more. She lies back down on the bed, thoroughly exhausted, as the remnants of her panic work their way out of her system.

“Red?” he asks again.

“I’m fine,” she says, and it’s more or less the truth. “I just got…overwhelmed.” 

Instinctively, she rolls onto her back and pulls the Transistor to her, then onto her. The top of the long hilt rests awkwardly just below her cheekbone, but the blade is a heavy weight, cool and comforting, on the rest of her body. She takes a deep breath, feels the pressure, sighs again.

_Here I am._

He sighs, too. It’s a regretful, staticky sound, unhappy and mechanical. It barely resembles her own.

“Red…I’m so sorry it turned out this way.”

She turns her head just a little, presses her lips to the hilt of the Transistor.

“Me too,” she says. “But it’s not your fault. And I think…it’s better than the alternative.” 

She yawns, and when he speaks again she can hear a wistful smile in his voice.

“Yeah. Now get some rest.”

She nods awkwardly against her pillow, already drifting off. But –

“Hey,” she murmurs.

“What is it?”

“When I wake up,” Red says, quiet and slow. A breath. _It will be all right_ , she tells herself, and refuses to think about the alternative. “When I wake up. We’re gonna fix all this. ‘Kay?”

“You always have a plan,” he says fondly, and then she is asleep again.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The lyrics quoted in this chapter are from the bonus track She Shines! It's lovely, and I highly recommend you look it up on Youtube if you haven't heard it before.

When Red wakes for the second time, it’s the middle of the night. The sky, without anyone to program or change it, shows only what is actually there: a few distant stars and a brilliant full moon. Its light shines down on the city, making its white surfaces gleam. Everything is very still, very silent. 

It’s surreal and beautiful, and it makes the back of Red’s neck prickle uneasily. This isn’t the Cloudbank she knows and loves, and she’s hesitant to step out into it. But waiting won’t improve things, and she’s the only one who can fix her city. So, nothing for it: she gets up, stretches, gets ready, and steps outside less than half an hour later – she’s never been one to put off for long what has to be done. She leaves the front door open behind her; it spills its small warm light into the open air in defiance of the city’s emptiness.

“Where to?”

“Nowhere.” Red lifts the Transistor down from her shoulder, planting it in the terrace at her feet and resting her hands on the crossguard. “The best view in town is right here.” They’re quiet together for a moment, looking out over the city and, in the distance, the dark waters of the bay. Finally, Red takes a few deep breaths, closes her eyes, and begins to hum. It’s an aimless tune at first, something slow and distant, presented in a minor key. But it gives her time to think.

Cloudbank. Her city. Not this empty white ghost spread out beneath her, but something more vibrant: something gleaming, lit from above and within. The footlights on the Empty Set, uniform circles of gold. The orange _X_ on the OVC headquarters downtown. Green lights shining from windows; white lights from doorways; blue lights creating mosaics on the sides of buildings.

The lights lit up the sky; they lit up the bay and the river. Even the grey slate of the sidewalks caught some of that glow and returned it, an endless cycle of refraction that highlighted pedestrians and vehicles and buildings from all angles.

Inspiration strikes with the impact of a well-aimed breach. Red stops humming and reaches out to the Transistor; it flickers in time with her words, a light she can see even with her eyes closed.

_“I see the light...dance on the bay...all of the dark falls away...”_

She knows the city as intimately as a lover, as intimately as anyone who ever lived within its limits. And the words and the melody are coming to her now. All she has to do is voice them. All she has to do is remind Cloudbank of what it truly is.

_“I’m always breathless to see...growing so slowly to meet me...where I end and where she begins...”_

“Red!” he murmurs urgently, speaking just loud enough to be heard underneath her singing. The Transistor begins to hum like an overtaxed machine under her fingers, providing a rough, heavy harmony as it channels her voice into power, into creation. “You need to see this!”

She doesn’t open her eyes, doesn’t stop singing. Instead, she describes the glowing skies, the clouds, and, _please let this work_ , a ‘we’ that encompasses all of the hundreds of thousands of people who sleep and work and laugh and _live_ in Cloudbank. Slowly, light blossoms on the other side of her closed eyelids, brightening until the Transistor’s flicker is almost lost.

_“Just on the edge of a dream...growing so slowly to greet me, tearing at all of its seams...”_

She imagines the real Cloudbank spreading out from the sound of her voice like dye seeping into water, like color and wings emerging from the small brown death of a chrysalis, and she sings the chorus of her newest song once, twice, three more times with growing power.

_“When she shines for me at night, and her skies show green and white, she will keep us in her sight...we all lie beneath her light!”_

The song ends. The air rings for a long moment with the force of her voice, then falls into silence. The Transistor’s thrumming quiets, then fades away. One beat passes, and another...and then the sounds of the city, music and engines and voices and so much more, burst into life around them.

Red opens her eyes at last and laughs, breathless and delighted. Overcome with emotion, she kneels and throws her arms around the Transistor, hugging him to her. “Red, Red,” he says in her ear, warm and relieved and proud. “You did it.”

“ _We_ did it,” she corrects, and he laughs too, but doesn’t argue.

“All right. We did it.” 

A comfortable silence falls between them...but the world on the other side of the balcony roars and beeps and chatters on. Red sighs contentedly, leans her head against the Transistor’s hilt, and looks over the railing at their city, restored and brilliant with life.

Cloudbank. _Cloudbank._ Oh, how she shines.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _So does it make a difference, what Red did all that time ago? The old city of Cloudbank has become what it is now, and that won’t change no matter what we believe. Red is long-dead no matter when, precisely, she died, and thus is beyond caring what we think of her. And in the end, of course, the entire series of events is all but lost to history: there’s no way of knowing for sure what happened._
> 
> _Why not, then, choose to believe the more hopeful story – to put faith in the strength of one woman’s spirit rather than imagine that it reached its limits just as she’d won a victory that was more sweet than bitter? Why not imagine her as a creator as well as a destructor? Why not give her memory a chance to live, if not a perfect life, at least a good life worth enjoying?_
> 
> _After all, it’s hard to tell when that hopeful choice will make a difference to someone who does matter in the here and now._

When word gets out of what she has done, Cloudbank, in an enormous swelling of popular opinion so certain that no one even bothers to run any polls on it, offers her the position of Head Administrator.

Red turns it down. 

She watches from her apartment as, over the next few days, cooler heads prevail: people who understand that this is an opportunity to fix what went wrong with their city, rather than continue in the same way they always have. Gradually, people adopt a new perspective. This is a chance – for _Cloudbank_ of all places, the city that famously changes every day in a hundred thousand small ways while staying completely the same in a handful of larger, more important ways – to try something truly _new._

And that is why, when all five members of the new administrative team come for the Transistor, Red gives it to them. 

Their hands are gentle, respectful, careful with but not in awe of the power they hold. One of them takes the weapon fully from the others, kneels unceremoniously on her apartment floor, and slides something into a port on the hilt that she’s never noticed before.

“Red,” says another with a sober smile, drawing her attention away from the Transistor. “You saved this city. You gave us all a second chance. We’ll do everything we can to do right by it. Everyone will.”

She nods, and her returning smile is lighter. She could be afraid, like these baby administrators, thrust into positions they aren’t entirely sure they’re ready for yet (she can’t even imagine one of the Camerata ever kneeling on the floor). She is afraid, still, of what happens next, of what her life will be now. But it can’t be worse than what she’s just come through. And anyhow, that’s almost irrelevant in the end: she fought for him, for Cloudbank, and for herself, and now she _will_ taste the fruits of her victory. And so will everyone else. 

Together, they’ll all figure it out.

The administrator with the Transistor stands and holds something out to her in one hand. She takes it: a little shimmering chip, just the right size to hold in her palm, lightweight and cut from the same blue-green material as the Transistor itself. Lines of gold stripe the bottom half of one side, channels for data, ridges under her fingers. The top half is wrapped in a soft, looping cord.

“Hi,” he says to her from within it.

“Hey.” 

She presses him to her chest, her head down, for a long moment. The administrators cough, shuffle, look away. In a moment she’ll be grateful for that.

The time comes. Red slips the cord over her neck, and the weight of him is solid and cool as it rests just below the hollow of her collarbone. She reaches for the pen and pad of paper she’s always kept on her person. It used to be for music and lyrics. Maybe someday it will be again. Now, though, she writes: _The others?_

“In the Country. Their Traces were too damaged to restore, or they had no one left to be reunited with. We won’t keep them here.”

“It’s true,” he confirms. That’s a relief.

She nods to them, shakes her head when they ask if there’s anything else they can do for her and then shakes each of their hands as they turn to leave. They take the Transistor with them. She’s not at all sorry to see it go; it was never meant for her, and she already has everything she could possibly need from it.

Red gives the new administrators a few minutes to descend back to street level, then steps out onto her balcony. Before her, over the bay, the sun is beginning to set in a blaze of gold, turning the sky a clear electric blue and setting the water to shimmering. She’s glad her people voted to see this today: a natural, ordinary, beautiful sunset.

Tomorrow will be different. There might be rain, or snow. The weather system might be disabled for maintenance again – it will take time to heal from the scars of the Process, after all, despite Red’s restorative work. But at least they all _can_ heal. At least she can begin to learn sign language, can still speak with the man she loves, can go out into Cloudbank as their interconnected lives fall into a new normalcy and find out what she’ll do next, both with and for herself and her city.

And really, when she thinks about it, that’s not _at least_ at all, is it? That’s…that’s everything.

“Where do you want to start?” he asks her one more time. She can hear in his voice how much he loves her, how glad he is to be here with her, and she raises one hand from the balcony railing to hold tightly to the chip around her neck.

“Tomorrow is going to be a busy day,” Red tells him seriously. “We’ll need to prepare.” She pauses. He makes a somber noise, audibly bracing himself. She smiles. “So I’m thinking a large sea monster flatbread, and then an episode or two of that show you like so much before we go to bed.” 

He laughs, happy and relieved, for far longer than her words really merit. “You really do always have a plan,” he says fondly. “Well, come on, then. Flatbread and rest, and then tomorrow. You’ve earned it.”

“Yes,” she agrees, and turns away from the view before her. It’ll still be there tomorrow, and so will they. “We have.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Tumblr user emitter-of-learjets for her help and inspiration. <3
> 
> Find me at hencegoodfortune.tumblr.com! I don't blog about it primarily, but I'd be more than happy to talk about Transistor or this fic with you. Thank you for reading!


End file.
